The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (37 page)

In the movies, people died instantaneously. In real life, it could take a couple of minutes.

“That’s OK, sir,” Tony said, respectfully. “Don’t you worry about wetting your pants. I don’t think anyone will mind.”

He then withdrew the knife and slid it into the dry peat moss in the bottom of a nearby brass urn full of plastic plants. Not much blood was showing, given the way the chest muscles had clenched. The knife might or might not turn up in a search, depending on whether matters were handled by local police whose main job was writing tickets to beachgoers who parked illegally — which was kind of redundant, given that any out-of-towner parking near the beach could be presumed to be parking illegally, thus generating a big share of the little town’s annual revenues.

Being caught with the knife bearing blood of an identifiable type would have been the only way to link him to the hit. This way, once he walked out the door, he had no more connection to the former congressman than any of 100,000 other beachgoing tourists in town today.

It had been about a five-hour drive, staying well within the speed limits. They figured there might be some kind of after-the-fact scan of surveillance tapes looking for Rhode Island vehicles, which explained his current Connecticut plate. He could make it home without having to generate any motel bills. He’d even topped off his tank around lunchtime back in New York state, paying cash, so there’d be no credit card purchases of gas in New Jersey, either. Though he would
stop somewhere and duck into a roadside men’s room to shave off his three-month-old mustache and take scissors to his Beatles-style hair. None of his ID photos showed the mustache or the longer hair — the guy who’d conducted the last interview with former Congressman Franklin Roosevelt Howard would simply disappear like he’d never existed.

In and out, clean as a whistle.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

The five well-dressed men and one woman in business attire had just cleared the luggage carousels at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick when they spotted the older black man in the black jacket and chauffeur’s cap, holding the white sign that bore the name of their party — actually, the name of the senior judge who’d called to arrange their limousine.

“Yes sir, I’se the one,” smiled the old black man, who displayed a well-trimmed, Uncle-Remus-style white mustache and beard. “We’s in the white van right through them slidin’ doors there. Everyone got all their luggage? Here, let me hep you with that, ma’am.”

The party of six district judges had just returned from a week-long, all-expenses-paid summer conference on sentencing enhancements sponsored by the federal Department of Justice at a nice fishing lodge in Canada. Two of them had actually presented a paper on the need to give sentencing judges more latitude, arguing mandatory minimum drug sentences were crowding the prisons and doing more harm than good.

But Windsor Annesley had been very clear. The one-year grace period had ended. The Fearless Drug Warriors had made no effort whatsoever to call off their War on Drugs as required, and there would no longer be any consideration granted for cold feet or half-measures. Proposing to “switch from incarceration to forced medical treatment” would not earn the perpetrators a single day’s reprieve, any more than Washington and Jefferson would have settled for anything less than complete independence from Britain once they’d won at Saratoga and fought the British to a standstill at Monmouth Courthouse and watched the French come in on their side.

The victims of the Drug War had suffered for a full hundred years without fighting back, but now the Fearless Drug Warriors were on notice: They had only one option, which was to declare all drugs legal and freely available — not even a required warning label on the side of the package — immediately. They had frittered away all opportunity for compromise. They had launched this war, and now they would find out what it was like to be on the front lines of a war they themselves had declared, a war they had refused to call off, an unlimited war with no constitutional restrictions, no quarter asked or given.

Uncle Remus got all the luggage arranged in the back of the van, hearing the clink of quite a few duty-free liquor bottles which he knew had not been checked by Customs, since judges flew with gold badges which exempted them from all the strip-search humiliation to which the peasant classes — the victim classes — were routinely subjected.

The six judges arranged themselves in the van, which easily had room for twice that many passengers. The lady judge and one of her male colleagues chose the rear seat. When they thought no one was looking, they surreptitiously held hands.

“Everybody got their belts fastened?” the driver asked, cheerfully, as he got in and started her up, rolling slowly for the first forty yards away from the terminal. “It’s the law, you know, I gots to ask! Ha ha!”

Then he slowly braked to a stop at the side of the access road, put the van in park with the engine running, opened his door and unfastened his own seat belt. “Just gots to take care of one more thing,” he said. “This just take me a moment.” Taking his clipboard, the driver walked along the side of the van toward the back, where his passengers assumed a warning light had probably told him his tailgate was not properly fastened. He did not stop at the tailgate, however, but stepped up onto the curb and continued walking back toward the terminal, another thirty yards, where he approached a security guard, indicated the clipboard in his hand, and said he wanted to report a problem — he had no idea why, but the serial number on the
van he’d been given didn’t match the one that his clipboard said he was supposed to be driving.

And then, six seconds later, with a blast audible a mile away, the van disintegrated into a flaming mass of twisted metal, shooting a tower of black smoke and orange flame — and assorted pieces of six District Court judges — two hundred feet in the air.

Once they got back up to their feet and checked to make sure they weren’t missing any body parts, the security guard raced toward the flaming wreck to see if anyone had survived. Uncle Remus, on the other hand, moved more slowly. In fact, he took off his cap, scratched his head, and under his breath asked no one but himself, “Say, how that War on Drugs be goin’, anyway?”

Miraculously, one bottle of duty-free Canadian whisky survived intact.

* * *

Assistant prosecutor Sturm Wolfson — who’d walked Sgt. Phil Robichaux through his carefully rehearsed testimony at the inquest into the shooting death of unarmed business owner Leroy Johnson — had gotten an advance in grade, which translated into a nice raise and a nicer office, for his work on the big Windsor Annesley case. That was one guy who wasn’t going to be causing them any more trouble. Plus, one great side benefit of that kind of high-profile case was that few drug defendants were bothering to even try to put up a defense, anymore.

All juries in such cases were now carefully screened through the so-called “voir dire” process to remove anyone who might be tempted to acquit or go for a lesser included charge or otherwise question the judge’s orders to convict based on the laws being “too Draconian” or “unconstitutional” or any other such bullshit, the result being that Wolfson’s office currently had a better-than-98-percent conviction rate in drug cases, even when the defendant was just some junior sidekick dweeb driving the delivery van who’d been too dumb to turn state’s evidence as fast as everybody else.

So the vast majority of defendants played it smart and pleaded out to the best deal they were offered by their so-called “defense” attorneys — who’d be jailed for contempt or even disbarred if
they
tried to challenge the validity of the laws or even tell the jurors they had every right to acquit, to judge the law as well as the facts of the case, even in open defiance of the judge’s orders. Just let one of those piss-ant public defenders mention a jury-rights ruling like
U.S. v. Moylan
or
U.S. v. Dougherty,
“The pages of history shine upon instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge, for example acquittals under the fugitive slave law.” Ha! See how fast they found themselves in the slammer on a contempt citation if they tried to tell a jury about
that
crap!

Long and short of it being, Sturm had wrapped up his full docket of cases early this afternoon and should be home in plenty of time for his son’s fifth birthday party.

In fact, he’d already slowed down to turn into the driveway of his spacious half-million-dollar Cape Cod-style house in suburban Cranston when he spotted the Mexican gardener with the hood up on his rattletrap pickup truck, lawn mowers and other gear stowed in the back, parked right across the street. “Senor!” the man shouted as he saw Sturm slow down, smiling and walking toward him and pointing to the Mexican’s own cell phone, which he held in his left hand, “I doan suppose you have a cell phone I could use?”

What? The guy
had
a cell phone. Or maybe he was just indicating his battery had run down or something. Yeah, that had to be it. Sturm couldn’t read the name of the company on the side of the green pickup truck, the painted white lettering being half peeled off. He wondered idly if he’d seen it before in the neighborhood.

“What seems to be the problem?” Sturm asked, slowing to a stop, putting the car in park and rolling down his window, his turn signal still indicating he was at his own driveway.

“Oh, no problem,” the Mexican smiled as Sturm opened his door and started to get out. “But hey, senor, how’s that War on Drugs going?” The little brown fellow then slipped his own cell phone
into his shirt pocket, used his right hand to pull a stubby, four-inch revolver out from the back of his waistband, brought his left hand out away from his chest to get the hand cannon in a firm triangular grip, and put five rounds of semi-jacketed .44 hollow-point into Sturm Wolfson’s black-and-yellow checked necktie and pale blue, no-iron, cotton-percale shirt front.

Pausing a second to make sure the rounds had done their job on the prosecutor, who was now sitting in the road quite motionless with his back up against his own left rear tire, his head quivering a little as his neck muscles continued to twitch, the gardener then shoved the handgun back into his belt, slowly walked back across the street, slammed the hood closed on his stolen pickup truck, got in and started the engine.

He was already driving off, careful to observe the speed limit, on his way to the supermarket parking lot where he’d switch vehicles about a half-mile away, when a little five-year-old boy in a party hat and carrying an ice cream cone came running down the driveway, shouting “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

* * *

In a low-rent neighborhood in West Providence, upstairs from a liquor store that had closed hours before as required by Rhode Island’s quaint if somewhat antiquated “blue laws,” Providence Police Sergeant Phil Robichaux looked behind him to make sure his five-man team was stacked properly behind him at the top of the outside staircase, ready for their dynamic entry into the second floor apartment where “Big Tiny” Little — the large young black man who had played two years of college football before dropping out to support his ladylove by dealing half-ounce bags of marijuana — was now expected to be sleeping it off with said nine-month-pregnant negress.

As arranged by Robichaux’s contact at the ballpark, he and the detectives had set up Little for several drug deals, surreptitiously recording and photographing the genial, slow-talking young man as he haggled a bit over price and then delivered almost $700 worth of
dope to them in three separate purchases, enough to send him up for several years.

The sergeant nodded, and they simultaneously dropped the face-plates on the coal-scuttle black combat helmets they wore over their coal-black bullet-resistant SWAT attire. They displayed no badges, nor did any of them have a search warrant in his hand. Robichaux and his partner carried pump-action shotguns; the back-up men behind them carried M-14 select-fire rifles in .308 caliber with flashlights clamped along the tops of the barrels and nasty-looking high-capacity magazines jutting from beneath their receivers — basically, enough firepower to capture a fortified crossroads in the Ardennes.

Now Robichaux placed his shotgun, carrying in its chamber a first round known as a “Doorbuster,” up against the lock on the apartment door, and blew it to kingdom come. Kicking the hollow plywood door the rest of the way open, he shouted “Freeze! Police! Warrant!” as he ran down the front hall toward the bedroom, pausing to kick open the bathroom door and spray the unoccupied toilet bowl with a cautionary round of buckshot, as well.

Behind him, his men poured quickly through the second-floor apartment, their rifle-mounted flashlights sending beams of light bobbing weirdly along the darkened ceilings and walls.

From the bedroom, Robichaux heard another shotgun blast, meaning his partner had probably saved the courts the trouble of dealing with “Big Tiny” Little. The dumb-ass negro had almost certainly made a “furtive movement” in an attempt to put his dick away in his boxers. Most of them did that.

When Robichaux arrived in the bedroom, though, he was surprised to find several of his boys using their rifle barrels to poke around in the pillows and blankets on the big double bed which formed pretty much the room’s only furnishing. It appeared a couple of the big foam-rubber pillows had been arranged under the covers to make it look as though the bed held two sleeping occupants. A cloud of foam rubber and feathers was still drifting down toward the floor, but no “Big Tiny” Little, and no pregnant girlfriend.

“Where the hell are they?” he asked, reaching to turn on the overhead light.

“Dry hole,” one of his men replied. “No one in the closets, either.”

“Goddammit, you do know we have to file a report on a firearms discharge, don’t you?” Robichaux asked, ignoring the fact he himself had sprayed the toilet with buckshot as he came past the bathroom. “What are you going to say, the pillow made a furtive movement toward its waistband?”